The Darkest Place on the Internet Isn’t Just for Criminals

Illustration: Edel Rodriguez

Vile though their crimes may be, pedophiles and hit men have figured out something vital when it comes to communicating. Lots of them—the ones with any security sense—use a Darknet. These are networks of secretive websites that can’t be viewed on the “regular” Internet.

Darknet sites are hosted on regular servers, but to access them you need special software, usually something that encrypts all users’ traffic and allows them relative anonymity. Get set up with the right technology and presto: You can see a second, parallel Internet. Right now it’s full of nasty (or, at the very least, illegal) activity like illicit drug or arms sales, or pedophile rings.

The Darknet is populated by precisely who you’d expect to be skulking in the darkest corners of the online world. They have something to hide.

But the Darknet, by itself, isn’t evil. And now that all of us have, in a sense, something to hide—the details of our humdrum, legal, everyday lives—it’s time to put the Darknet to good use.

The regular Internet is a hotbed of surveillance. Depending on how you’re reading this article, someone is probably watching you read it. Edward Snowden’s leaks capably documented how US spy agencies have their mitts on the big central services—cloud email, social networks—that we use regularly. In fact, we should probably just start calling the web the Spynet. (“What are you up to this morning?” “Nothing much, just shopping for some books on the Spynet.”)

It was already an uneasy bargain, conducting so much of our social lives on for-profit sites. We kind of knew that going in. But when the Leviathan of the state becomes so involved, it’s an order of magnitude worse. We need a space to start fresh—building applications that are decentralized and encrypted from the get-go so they allow us a greater degree of privacy. We need a new terrain. That’s the Darknet.

This sounds nuts, yes? Makes us all seem like criminals? Except that even legitimate, nonshady organizations have migrated onto the Darknet to make sure their doings stay away from prying eyes. The New Yorker, for example—not exactly famous as a hive of evildoers—ran a Tor-hidden service built by the hacker Aaron Swartz and wired‘s investigations editor, Kevin Poulsen, so whistleblowers can securely leave documents or messages. (Tor is one of those pieces of encrypting software you need to access the Darknet in the first place.)

The late Aaron Swartz (above) and WIRED’s Kevin Poulsen built a secure document-drop service for whistleblowers. Sage Ross/AP Images

Dissidents around the world use Darknet services to avoid authoritarian forces. DuckDuckGo, a privacy-minded search engine, also runs a Tor-hidden service so users can search the web in complete anonymity. DuckDuckGo itself has no idea who’s typing the queries. Even the US military gets the need for a place to do everyday things in secret, apparently: Tor’s creation was sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory.

Plus, other alternative Internets are emerging, and they work quite differently from the Darknet’s anonymous drug dens.

We should probably just start calling the web the Spynet. (‘What are you up to this morning?’ ‘Nothing much, just shopping for some books on the Spynet.’)

Programmer Caleb James DeLisle launched Hyperboria, an encrypted network made up of people connecting to one another in a peer-to-peer fashion. Nobody can intercept or alter a connection— “unless I’ve made a big mistake,” DeLisle says, and he’s had several mathematicians kicking Hyperboria’s cryptographic tires.

But here’s the thing: You can join Hyperboria only by asking an existing user to connect you, which means it grows slowly—there are just some 500 users now. That creates a collegial feel, a sort of early-days-Internet vibe, and it keeps out pedophiles, hit men, and (for now, probably) spy agencies. Indeed, DeLisle doesn’t regard it as part of the Darknet at all, because he designed it specifically to promote community. (DeLisle’s design also happens to prevent creepy, anonymous behavior.)

“This is like another facet of the slow food movement—it’s like the ‘slow Internet’ movement, except it shouldn’t be slow,” he says. “It’s like buying from a farmer’s market.”

I think it’s working. When I visited, I could already see the trappings of our regular Internet. Hyperboria had a Twitterish clone called Social-node, a Reddit-powered voting-and-sharing service called Uppit, spaces for file-sharing, some blogs, and lively IRC channels. The conversations were friendly and nerdy, probably in part because it still requires a fair bit of technical smarts to figure out how to join. “The founder of CD Baby went on and said, ‘Wow, this is like the Internet in 1994,’ ” DeLisle says. It’s devoid of corporate shilling and link-baity “click here” sites.

Ev Bogue runs a Hyperboria-only blog and enjoys the feeling of having a separate space where his utterances aren’t crawled and archived by outside forces. “There’s kind of an expectation that you’re not going to post things in Hyperboria that you’d post to the normal Internet”—the Clearnet, as Hyperboria users call it. “So amazing to be part of something new,” as one user posted excitedly when he arrived the day I did.

Granted, alternative spaces like Hyperboria aren’t the total answer to our privacy problems. If they get big and develop their own centralized Facebookian services, then spy agencies will no doubt socially hack their way in. Only political action and better laws can seriously dismantle the US governments’ spying addiction. And though Hyperboria is speedy and well run, the regular Internet is still unavoidable for most work and everyday life—we’re not going to abandon it en masse.

But what if lots of ­people started using Darknets some of the time? Having a parallel Internet—or better yet, many parallel ones—could be terrifically useful. You could run your main social life on Facebook on the Clearnet but duck into Hyperboria or a Tor-­hidden service for socializing and reading and writing that you don’t want hoovered up by spy agencies or ad networks.

We need fresh ideas for the way we hang out online, and Darknets fit the bill. If you’d like to read more about my thoughts on this, meet me on Hyperboria. I’m thinking of starting a blog.